I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

Has The United Nations Finally Gone Completely Mad Over Glencore?

It would appear that at least part of the United Nations has entirely lost whatever collective intelligence it ever had. Entirely thrown away all rational thought and now crouches gibbering in the corner of the madhouse. It has been reported in London today that one of the organisation’s senior figures said the following:

With the US experiencing a rerun of the drought “Dust Bowl” days of the 1930s and Russia suffering a similar food crisis that could see Vladimir Putin‘s government banning grain exports, the senior economist of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Concepcion Calpe, told The Independent: “Private companies like Glencore are playing a game that will make them enormous profits.”

Ms Calpe said leading international politicians and banks expecting Glencore to back away from trading in potential starvation and hunger in developing nations for “ethical reasons” would be disappointed.

“This won’t happen,” she said. “So now is the time to change the rules and regulations about how Glencore and other multinationals such as ADM and Monsanto operate. They know this and have been lobbying heavily around the world to water down and halt any reform.”

It’s not just the UN that seems to have lost its marbles either. Oxfam appears to have had its intelligence coddled:

Last month food prices rose by an average of six per cent globally and Oxfam has strongly condemned the lines being taken by major food traders such as Glencore.

Jodie Thorpe said: ‘Glencore’s comments that ‘high prices and lots of volatility and dislocation’ was ‘good’ gives us a rare glimpse into the little-known world of companies that dominate the global food system.’

She Glencore was ‘profiting from the misery and suffering of poor people who are worst hit by high and volatile food prices.’

We really ought to put out a call for the missing intelligence points of this pair. We would like them to get their IQ up back over their shoe size after all.

Their comments came after one of Glencore’s senior executives said the following:

On a conference call the company’s Director of Agricultural Products said: ‘In terms of the outlook for the balance of the year, the environment is a good one.

‘High prices, lots of volatility, a lot of dislocation, tightness, a lot of arbitrage opportunities.

‘We will be able to provide the world with solutions, getting stuff where it is needed and that should be good for Glencore.’

So our company exec was saying that his company saw the possibility of making good profits over the course of the rest of the year. By, essentially, moving food around the world. At which point Oxfam, one of the world’s major famine relief charities, attacks him for his actions, the UN seems to think that the rules, the law, should be changed to prevent them doing any such thing?

What madness is this? What perversion of simple basic logic drives these people to such stupidity?

Let us start at the beginning: the harvests in certain parts of the world this year will be bad. Harvests in other parts look pretty much OK and there’s some food in storage around the world as well. In order to stop people starving where those harvests have failed we need to get food from where there is some to where there isn’t any.

To do this we would need an organisation or two who knows how to identify where that surplus and moveable food is. Then know how to purchase it, transport it to port, hire a ship or two to carry it, unload it, then get it to those places where there isn’t any food. This is known generally as feeding people: you know, the cure for people having no food is to get food to them?

Do we have any organisations that know how to do all of this? Fortunately, yes, we do. We generally call them commodity traders. Glencore is one of the largest of them and is very big in wheat. ADM (Archers Daniel Midland) is another and is very big in corn. Cargill trades just about all foodstuffs and Louis Dreyfus is the world’s largest rice trader. These are exactly the people who know how to find, transport, then distribute (and importantly finance all of them) food around the world. In fact, these are the very people who do do that, year in and year out. They’re the very people who make the entire international food network operate, alleviating famine in areas of food shortage by shipping food surpluses from other areas to them.

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